What Makes a Good Book Cover?
Let’s stop pretending that book covers don’t matter. For just a second, let’s all be honest with ourselves: we do judge books by their covers, to at least some degree. When you’re perusing and looking for a book without a recommendation, what gets you to pick up a book is the cover, the spine, and/or the title. Covers matter. They’re important and they absolutely sell books. Okay, now that we’ve all admitted that to ourselves (right?), let’s talk about what makes a cover good, at least in my personal opinion. I’m going to structure this by talking about a few different cover trends I’ve noticed and what I do and don’t like about them.
The Worst of the Worst: Realistic People on Covers
Controversial opinion warning! Is this a controversial opinion? Maybe? I don’t think it is, or at least I don’t think it should be. Covers featuring real people are just terrible. They tell me next to nothing about the book, they look lazy, and they look like they could be for anything. We see this a lot in the romance and erotica genres, but it’s also prevalent in other spaces, too. Some of the worst offenders in this regard are novels promoting a film or television adaptation. You know: when they rerelease a book with the cast on the cover? Those are… bad.
I think what irks me about these covers is that it inhibits my imagination. Anything imaginative is thrown out. I’m shown specific characters and settings, realistically, and there’s simply nothing left to guess. There’s no mystery. “These are your characters”. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the people on the cover could be anyone. It’s especially bad when the person is someone famous—someone you know. Ben Affleck is on the cover of the Gone Girl novel designed to promote the film. Thankfully, he’s vague enough that you can’t really tell that it’s him at just a quick glance, but that’s still bad.
If a real person is on the cover of a book, it had better be that person’s biography. And even if it is that person’s biography, I’d really prefer that the cover have a little more effort than that.
Photo Covers
We’ve all seen these, I’m sure. Book covers that feature what is quite clearly a photograph, possibly even a stock photograph. Maybe the photograph is edited a bit, it has some changes made to it so that it’s a little more in line with what you’d expect from a book cover, but ultimately… it’s just half-baked garbage. It looks like the publisher doesn’t really care about the work enough to contribute real artwork to it, which makes me think that it probably isn’t a book I should care about, either.
I think that this is acceptable in one circumstance and one circumstance only: books about photography. If you’re selling a landscape photography book, of course you should have a landscape photo as your cover. Duh.
But if you’re an author—especially a big-name author—of a written book, get a better cover. Seriously. Much like the covers with realistic people on them, these covers just feel incredibly lazy.
The Over-Crowded Cover
Some covers just have way too much going on for you to actually determine anything at all about the story. It’s hard to gather a theme or purpose from these covers. At a glance, it just looks like a mess that I want to walk right past. I find that fantasy—especially classic fantasy—is quite guilty of this. There are so many fantasy covers for books I actually enjoy that just have such jumbled, messy covers that I don’t want them on my shelf at all. A large part of this is a product of time since fantasy has definitely evolved in its cover design over the years, but there are still covers in this style being produced, today.
The real issue I think comes from having a cast of unique characters on your cover, all of whom are wearing unique clothes, carrying unique weapons. Maybe you’ve got a mixture of elves and dwarves and humans and gnomes on there. Ultimately, it just looks like an ad for your weekly D&D stream rather than a work of prose. Loathe as I am to admit it, some of the classic Discworld covers fall prey to this. I know, I speak heresy, here, but it’s true. You also see these sorts of things on covers for The Wheel of Time and many other classic fantasy books. As I said, it’s really a trend that seems to have been largely abandoned for popular books, but you do still see it now and then.
So What Do I Like…?
This has been a really cruel list of many cover styles I seriously dislike, and I haven’t said anything so far about what I do like. Seems a bit counterintuitive, but I think that to establish what makes a good cover, I need to explain what I really don’t like in covers. Now, we can look at what’s left. What draws my eye? What makes me want to pick up a book? More importantly, what makes me want to display a book? There are a few factors that I think make a book cover interesting to me, so let’s get into those.
Mystery and Curiosity
I think one of the most important things that a cover can do is inspire curiosity. Make me wonder what the book is about. How is the cover justified and what does it mean? This means that especially abstract, weird, or unusual covers are more likely to draw me to them and make me read the book blurb to learn more. If your cover doesn’t inspire mystery, it means I’m going to just guess what the book is about, chalk it up to being “just another X” or “a knockoff of Y”, and move on.
Limited Color Palette
Having a minimalist color palette is another way to get me interested in your book. Instead of having your book cover as a splattering of many different colors, give me a few colors used distinctly and interestingly. There are many excellent modern covers that do this well. It’s also one of the things that inspired me to get the entire Collector’s Library Discworld collection! There are many other books I have that use this. The Red Rising trilogy is a good example, as is Evan Winter’s The Burning.
Distinction
The last thing that I think makes a cover great is distinction; specifically, I like it when a book sets itself apart instead of looking generic. This is different from mystery and curiosity, my first point, because a book cover can inspire curiosity while still being too generic. An example, I think, is The Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne. The covers aren’t too bad, but while they inspire curiosity, they aren’t that distinct. There are tons of covers out there that just have a weapon on the front and that’s it. So while yes, these covers do inspire curiosity because of their vagueness, they aren’t distinct in a way that makes me want to pick them up. A distinct, unique design is a key factor in whether I like a book’s cover.
But What Do I Know?
Look, I’m not some big name in the publishing industry, I don’t really know what I’m talking about in terms of mass audiences or what sells best. Clearly, some of the covers I hate are still selling books, so ultimately my opinion is just that: an opinion. However, I have noticed that covers are trending away from many of the things I’ve stated I dislike and toward many of the things I’ve stated I do like, so… I must be on to something, right?
Ultimately, everyone is going to have a different taste in covers. People are going to love things I hate and hate things I love. There are folks out there who greatly prefer covers that have the entire cast of the book on them. That’s totally fine, good for them! For me, even if I love the book, that isn’t a cover I would display facing outward.
Conclusion
Book covers are a lot more important than I think we give them credit for—they can make or break a book, in my opinion. At the very least, they determine whether or not I buy an eBook to hide the cover, or a physical copy to proudly display on my shelf. If you watch my videos (hey, you should! They're getting better, I think), then you know that I often turn books to face cover-out. I choose this based on a color scheme AND which covers I enjoy most. I can't see myself turning a book like the original "Colour of Magic" out, but I'd definitely turn the new collector's edition so all can see its beautiful blue spectacle.!